Links - 13th March 2025 (2 - Diversity)

Rupert Lowe MP on X - "It's disgusting that white people are being deliberately excluded from public sector jobs, internships or opportunities. Racism shouldn't be tolerated just because it's white people on the receiving end. Whoever is signing off this poison needs to be sacked. I am investigating."
Charlie Bentley-Astor on X - "At 17 years old, I gave up on becoming an actor despite then being in one of the best drama schools in the UK because 85% of the casting calls my agent received stipulated, "Caucasian's need not apply."  Not "Black actors wanted" or "Latin actors wanted" but "Caucasian's need not apply."  That is to say "All auditions welcome except from white people."  I knew I wasn't going to get anywhere, even if I could hone my skill to a competitive level. I knew then that the stories of the near future were not going to be about the white working class or ancient Britons or knights and their princesses.  Being an actor is the first job I ever wanted - from 4 years old I did nothing else.  I switched for 10 years to directing. But the tide has risen higher still and I find all grants and opportunities exclusively for "BAME people."  I am good at what I do. I have won awards and worked at one of the best theatres in the country. I offer insight and poetic depth with my skill. But I am white and say that men are not women and therefore merit does not enter into the calculation."
Left wingers will continue to pretend that this isn't happening, that white people aren't handicapped by DEI policies

End Wokeness on X - "Senior Vice President at Disney: "There's no way we're hiring a white male" Stop funding companies that hate you. #BoycottDisney. Pass it on."
Disney Senior VP Takes “Leave of Absence" After Being Caught Saying “There's No Way We're Hiring a White Male" - "O’Keefe sent over one of his spies, on a mock date with Disney Senior VP Michael Giordano, who can be seen on camera telling the secret female reporter that Disney purposely doesn’t hire white male writers, and actors solely on the basis of the color of their skin... I’m hearing that Giordano, who just deleted his LinkedIn account, has been told by Disney to take a “leave of absence” after this video came out. I’d be shocked if they don’t just quietly fire him for these comments.   One key moment in the video has Giordano telling the undercover reporter that one black candidate was turned down at Disney for not appearing sufficiently black — they were “half black”... This isn’t surprising. Christian Toto led me to a Film Threat investigative report which had former and current Disney employees spilling the beans about the company’s plans to chase away veteran animators in favor of its “diversity-at-all-costs” plan. The term, “Pale and Male is Stale” became an unofficial catchphrase behind the scenes, according to Film Threat."
The left wing cope is that the video cannot be trusted because it is "deceptively edited"

Is Hollywood snubbing White men? A new lawsuit claims so - "Brian Beneker, a script coordinator for the television show SEAL Team, has filed a lawsuit against CBS Studios and its parent company Paramount, alleging discrimination through the network’s diversity quotas.  Beneker, who has been a script coordinator since 2017, has also written some episodes for the show in 2019. He has also written the eighth episode of the current season, which is also the shows final one.  In his suit, he alleges that that he was repeatedly denied a staff writer job after the implementation of an “illegal policy of race and sex balancing” that promoted the hiring of “less qualified applicants who were members of more preferred groups,” namely those who identify as minorities, LGBTQ or women. Through his legal action, he seeks at least $500,000, as well as a court order making him a full-time producer on the series and barring the further use of discriminatory hiring practices. In his complaint, Beneker details instances when he was passed over for staff writing positions in favour of Black or women, who, in his opinion, were less experienced than he was and had no writing credits.  For instance, in 2019, Beneker was passed up for a Black writer. When he asked his senior about it, he was informed that CBS had diversity quotas for their writers’ room and they had to be fulfilled. He adds that since 2020, the show has hired six additional writers, all female. “During Season 6, approximately the summer of 2022, two female writer’s assistants, without any writing credits, were hired as staff writers,” states the complaint. “The first of these two hires was black. The second identified as lesbian.”  Beneker in his lawsuit states that these hiring practises undertaken by CBS has “created a situation where heterosexual, white men need ‘extra’ qualifications to be hired as staff writers when compared to their nonwhite, LGBTQ, or female peers.”... In 2016, the #HollywoodSoWhite became one of the most talked about topics, with many arguing that the entertainment industry suffered from an inclusion crisis. A report had revealed that of the 109 films and 305 television and digital series released in 2014, only 28 per cent of all speaking characters were people of colour. In reaction, in 2020, CBS announced that its slate of reality shows — such as Survivor, Big Brother and Love Island — would become more diverse. At the time, CBS said that 50 per cent of its casts for its unscripted shows must be Black, Indigenous or People of Colour (BIPOC). Moreover, it said that it would commit at least 25 per cent of its annual unscripted development budget must go towards creators and producers that are BIPOC. Later, in 2022, George Cheeks, CBS Entertainment Group’s CEO, had said that the network was setting a goal that all writers’ rooms on primetime series would have at least 40 per cent of minorities.  In fact, for this year’s Oscars, new rules came into being under which for a movie to be eligible for Best Picture, it must meet two of four new diversity standards. However, many view such diversity programs or quotas as simply being too ‘woke’. Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss in a PBS interview questioned Oscars’ inclusivity changes. “It’s an art. No one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is,” Dreyfuss said.  “You have to let life be life. I’m sorry, I don’t think there is a minority or majority in the country that has to be catered to like that.”... The timing of Beneker’s lawsuit is also very interesting. It comes after the US Supreme Court struck down affirmative action at colleges and universities in June 2023. In the matter of Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard, the top court had said, “The Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the equal protection clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”  This ruling also led to 13 Republican Attorneys General writing letters to Fortune 100 companies, warning them that several of their efforts to boost diversity are discriminatory."
Left wingers demand quotas for "minorities" and at the same time mock those who point out there're quotas. But they love to gaslight

Meme - God Save Great Britain @GSGB01: "Despite what the police say, seeing armed police patrolling at Christmas fairs is not normal and we should NOT have to live like this.  Do you agree?"
"Before Diversity: *Unarmed policeman*
After Diversity: *Policeman with bulletproof vest and guns*"

Meme - "Miss France *okay-looking black woman*
Runner Up *gorgeous white woman*"
Comment (elsewhere): "I'm as racist as it gets, but I can acknowledge there are some beautiful black women I would commit the "chocolate sin" with. This black broad is not it, the actual French chick is way hotter and it's not even close. The words "humiliation ritual" are overused, but this is definitely an example of that phrase. It's exceedingly obvious that the winner is an affirmative action/DEI pick. Going with an actually hot black woman defeats the purpose, as the point is to be offensive and grotesque as possible to the French people."

Jacob Geller— Bluesky - "Fascinating video on Steam trends, especially these statistics- of all the games released in Steam in 2024, just 2.5% had the "LBGTQ+" tag and 7% had the "female protagonist" tag. This is supposedly the political trend that's overwhelming and destroying gaming."
Sampling issues aside (I haven't seen people say that indie games are full of DEI), these are the same people who keep talking about Charlottesville claiming it proves that "Nazis" are everywhere, even though it was in 2017 and only one person died

Selaphiella— Bluesky - "I watched the video breaking down Steam's tags recently and saw some conversations about how "female protagonist" only made up around 7% of all games. I wanted to try and see how well this reflects actual games, so I created this graph based on Steam's top 250 rated titles."
31.6% had male protagonists, 14.4% had female ones, 8.4% had non-binary/genderless ones and 6.8% had ones with an ambiguous gender. This proves the point that this is being shoved in people's faces

Thread by @epkaufm on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Authors of a pro-DEI paper published in Nature and reported in Science made critical errors which nullify their findings. Not only did they bury inconvenient findings, they reported junk results. First, they found that Black and Hispanic scholars have far fewer cited published works than White and Asian scholars but did not report this. Women are also less productive than men. What we see is that the race gap is found mainly among men (decline slope of blue line), with little difference between races among female scholars (flat red line). This model controls for discipline and years in academia. Their other striking finding is that White and Asian candidates appear to be discriminated against in being promoted to full professor. They are 10-20 points less likely than Blacks/Hispanics to get promoted to professor. This gets a brief mention but is largely hidden. The finding they tout, that among less productive scholars Blacks and Hispanics are discriminated against, is based on flawed data. The authors used a dataset in which 1571 individuals were inflated to 9032 by multiplying by the number of academic letters written for them. Using only 1571 individuals results in the statistical significance of their headline finding disappearing. Had they done the analysis properly, the paper would not have been published. But researchers and publications lapped it all up without question since it accorded with their priors."
i/o on X - "The study's authors hid the fact that:
— White and Asian academics publish more than black and Hispanic ones
— Men are more productive than women
— Whites and Asians are discriminated against in promotions
And the author's data and statistical methods were flawed."

Junk Science is being used to Prop up DEI - "Whereas I had thought the authors of a paper claiming discrimination against minority scholars in academia were only guilty of burying their key findings while touting weak results, it now looks like their results are garbage: a result of sloppiness, mendacity, or both. This tells us a great deal about the knowledge production system in the social sciences, and how it systematically skews what experts consider to be the ‘truth’ and ‘settled science’. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is on the ropes these days. This is a big problem for institutions, such as most elite universities or Science magazine, that have invested deeply in this belief system. One way to rescue the enterprise is to tout new scientific results that buttress the claim that minorities and women are discriminated against in academia. Ergo the need for affirmative action.  Now the woke popular science magazine Science is trumpeting a new academic paper in the equally woke Nature Human Behaviour as a riposte to the naysayers. ‘Racial bias can taint the academic tenure process,’ screams the headline.  The paper’s authors claim Black and Hispanic academics with the same track record are discriminated against when they come up for tenure and promotion. But their data, if anything, points to anti-White/Asian bias, propping up weak results while covering up inconvenient but powerful findings... The term ‘p-hacking’ is used to describe quantitative analysis that tortures the data to find a significant finding that can be spun to support one’s priors. Consider what the authors did:  First, they did not pre-register the hypothesis they were going to test, allowing them to flex their hypothesis to match what they could mine from the data using a trial-and-error approach.  Second, they downplayed their strongest findings because these did not fit the narrative... They jumped at the results they wanted and got careless. Reviewers eagerly lapped it up. Science magazine ran with it. Inconvenient findings got buried. This is how science works when it gets near anything related to the holy DEI trinity of race, gender and sexuality.  Add one more paper to the mountain of junk that makes up the replication crisis in the social sciences.  Most academic proponents of DEI, or Social Justice, rely on pseudo-conspiratorial meta-theories like critical race theory or flabby qualitative methods like ‘auto-ethnography’ (a.k.a. contemplating one’s navel) to buttress their knowledge claims. No wonder James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian were able to publish so many hoax papers in grievance studies journals merely by parroting feminist and critical race theory buzzords. However, laundering woke ideas enough to sell them to organizations requires at least some scientific patina. Even a thin quantitative foundation can be enough to backstop what Doug Stokes terms the grievance-industrial complex, with its well-remunerated institutional programme of radical indoctrination and race or sex discrimination. We’ve seen this with claims of sex discrimination in academia, which have failed to replicate, and with shoddy arguments that diversity improves corporate performance. Rigorous and high-powered studies which come to the wrong conclusions go uncited while junk papers like this one grab the limelight and make into diversity training workshops."
Equity is about everyone ending up at the same place, so Black, Hispanic and female scholars publishing less than White, Asian and male ones doesn't mean they should be promoted less

Meme - Clifton Duncan @cliftonaduncan: "30 years ago a black man was the lead in a Star Trek show that ran 7 seasons, got 31 Emmy nominations, and was one of the most acclaimed series in the franchise.  No one was outraged. No one boycotted. No one cared. People who loved this show back then are called "toxic fans" today"
The cope is that this shows how hypocritical "bigots" are, because what is happening today is exactly the same as in the past and they didn't object then, and the only reason they're objecting now is they were told to be offended, because there is totally no difference between race-blind casting and shoving "minorities" into as many places as possible and demonising white men

James Bond producers nixed Amazon's 'woke' female 007 idea - "The family that controls the James Bond movie franchise reportedly refuses to give Amazon the go-ahead to make another film due to serious disagreements over the direction of the series — including one proposal for a TV spinoff centered on a female 007.  Barbara Broccoli — the 64-year-old daughter of the late Queens native Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, the film producer who acquired the rights to the famed spy created by British novelist Ian Fleming — has been at odds with Amazon execs ever since the e-retail giant acquired Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio for $8.5 billion in March 2022, according to the Wall Street Journal.  Her dissatisfaction with Amazon has reached the point where she is willing to hold the film “hostage” and delay the release of a new Bond sequel, the Journal reported.   “These people are f–king idiots,” Broccoli reportedly told friends when describing executives at Amazon. There hasn’t been a Bond film in three years, one of the longest dry spells since the franchise was launched with “Dr. No” in 1962.  Broccoli maintains an iron grip on 007, approving everything from scripts to who will be the next Bond after Daniel Craig hung up the famed tuxedo in the last film, “No Time to Die.”   Amazon executives have proposed a number of ideas to cash in on the Bond brand for its Prime Video service, including a spinoff featuring Miss Moneypenny, the secretary of MI6 spy chief M. There was even talk of casting a female to play the next 007, as well as more diverse options that would include gay or black leading men.  Broccoli shot down the idea of a female Bond, though she’s not opposed to having a gay or nonwhite actor star in the role, according to the Journal.  She does insist that whoever fills his shoes is a Brit... Broccoli and Wilson are also said to be upset that they have had a difficult time landing a meeting with senior Amazon executives — a far cry from the days when MGM head honchos were readily accessible to them, according to the Journal... Since Amazon bought MGM, the company has produced just one Bond-related product — a reality television show titled “007: Road to a Million” where teams compete in spy-themed challenges... A male spy who uses violence to achieve his aims while being a womanizer is apparently too much for some Amazon employees, one of which is reported to have said during a strategy meeting: “I have to be honest. I don’t think James Bond is a hero.”"

Jeff Bezos Wanted Broccoli Gone After She Called Amazon Execs 'Idiots' - "Broccoli is quoted as telling her personal friends that Amazon executives were “fucking idiots” amid dealings with the Bond franchise. As THR now stated, Bezos “read her quote in the Journal and got on the phone and said, ‘I don’t care what it costs, get rid of her,'” according to an unnamed insider. The outlet further included how Broccoli bristled when Amazon content chief Jennifer Salke referred to Bond films as “content,” and Broccoli’s half-brother Michael G. Wilson (who also steered the Bond franchise for decades) was iced out of meetings by Amazon executives... Amazon is also looking to capitalize on the IP with spin-offs, like UK TV professional Aaron McGahon speculated in a Marvel Studios-esque move. Sources close to the franchise claimed to THR that Amazon approached the Broccolis with “pitches for a TV series based on Moneypenny, the MI6 secretary […] as well as a show about Bond CIA buddy Felix Leiter, and maybe even something involving a female 007.” Yet, “predictably, Broccoli and Wilson weren’t interested.” ... Amazon may even have trouble finding one filmmaker to helm a franchise installment, let alone multiple. Osgood Perkins recently shut down the idea of directing a Bond film, simply saying on Reddit, “No, because fuck Jeff Bezos.”"

James Bond "To Stay British, Male Under Amazon Control" - report - "James Bond – now under the creative control of Amazon Studios following its buy-out of producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson – will remain a man and British (or the Commonwealth), according to UK media."

Meme - saila @sailaunderscore: "Why skiing is a high-trust society is left as an exercise for the reader."
Dissproportionately @dissproportion: "Amazing how you can still walk up to any ski hill and get free skis."

Top Oregon official put on leave for allegedly prioritizing 'qualified' job candidates over 'gender identity' - "A top Oregon state official has been put on administrative leave after a pink-haired, DEI-obsessed subordinate complained he was making hiring decisions based on qualifications instead of personal identity considerations, according to a report.  Mike Shaw, who until recently served as the Oregon Department of Forestry’s second-in-command, was put on blast by Megan Donecker, the department’s former DEI strategy officer, for looking “beyond gender and identity in hiring, seeking only candidates most qualified for the job,” OregonLive reported...   Shaw first drew Donecker’s ire when he dared suggest the agency — which has over 1,400 employees and a biennial budget over $577 million — take a measured approach to DEI initiatives, likening plunging into them headlong to driving too fast on “an icy road.”... Oregon State Forester Cal Mukumoto — who heads the department — said, “Providing a safe, diverse and inclusive workplace is a shared core value and priority of both the department and the Board of Forestry.”  Donecker, who has bright pink hair and numerous tattoos, has since left the department and has landed a new job as a “DEI consultant,” according to Daily Mail.  She now reportedly describes herself as “an accomplice to marginalized communities.” Oregon has been at the forefront of implementing sweeping DEI initiatives following the 2020 murder of George Floyd and subsequent civil unrest, which saw Portland engulfed in chaotic and often violent riots for more than 100 days.  However, the enthusiasm for such efforts appears to be on the decline.  Clackamas County announced in January that it had started to unwind its $830,000-per-year DEI office, calling it an “unnecessary expense” which “only foments friction.”"
Weird. We keep being told that "minorities" do not benefit from DEI and affirmative action, which only exist to level the playing field, but now someone is under investigation for not hiring based on minority identity

Meme - Rachel Hurley: "Misogyny 101. This is what DEI protected women from."
"Readers added context: This is photoshopped. The original photo can be found here:"
"AOC would be hot if she didn't open her mouth and speak"
Odd. Why is she claiming that DEI is meant to protect women from jokes, rather than to ensure non-straight white cis men can get hired?

Meme - Frank AnGremlins 2: The New B... @FrankAngones: "No, but really, look at this cocky teenage Latina coming to destroy your fragile ego with a look. I love this image so much. #DuckTales #DarkwingDuck #Gosalyn"
Possum Reviews @ReviewsPossum: "I agree that it's one of the worst tweets ever, but I can't seem to articulate precisely why beyond it having some sort of underlying creepiness combined with soyboyism.  Give me your analysis."
BWKing @FogTrials97770: "It's because of how utterly pointless it is. It's everything the past decade of woke has been rolled all into one."

South Bend sued for 'discriminatory' police applicant tests - "The U.S. Department of Justice is suing the City of South Bend, alleging discrimination against Black and female entry-level police department applicants.  The lawsuit, filed Friday, claims that by administering written tests that "disproportionately excludes African-American applicants" and physical tests that exclude female applicants, the city is in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that protects employees and job applicants from job discrimination. Since at least 2016, the lawsuit says, the South Bend Police Department has used a pass/fail component to screen candidates. In the selection process, applicants must perform six physical activities. Female applicants have passed at a lower rate than male applicants, the complaint said. Since 2019, more than 83% of male applicants passed the physical fitness test, while more than 47% of females passed... According to the complaint, the written tests consists of multiple-choice questions in areas including "observe and accurately describe events and objects" and "complete routine forms." Since 2016, 62% of African American applicants passed the written exam, compared to 84% of white applicants... The DOJ's lawsuit ignores the city's obligation to comply with state laws, they said. The written test, which the city said they regularly evaluate to make sure it's fair and non-biased, is similar to tests conducted at other Indiana police departments, including Indiana State Police. Additionally, the physical fitness test is consistent with standards set by the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy, the release said."
DEI is literally about lowering standards. Ensuring employees are competent is discriminatory

N.C. settles lawsuit over unintentionally discriminatory firefighter test - "Durham will pay nearly $1 million to 16 African Americans rejected from becoming firefighters after a test used to weed out job candidates was found to be unintentionally discriminatory.  The city announced on Tuesday that it had settled a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice that accused the Durham Fire Department of violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  At issue was a written test administered since 2015 to screen applicants for entry-level firefighter jobs in Durham.  The DOJ found that African Americans disproportionately failed the test when compared to white applicants, and were therefore prevented from getting interviews, despite the test not actually being related to the job."
The Comprehensive Examination Battery involves reading comprehension about fire-related material, mathematical calculations about firefighting-related tasks like how many lengths of hose you need, questions assessing how you would deal with casualties, colleagues and work problems, questions on English ability (firefighters need to write incident reports) and map reading (even with GPS, map reading skills aid navigation, especially if the GPS is broken). Clearly, removing such a test will have no impact on the ability of firefighters who get in

Representation for minorities in western gaming is not necessary : r/KotakuInAction - "The regressive left loves to complain about lack of representation. But, there is already a lot of representation from non-western studios. Chinese studios are great at representing chinese. South korean studios are great at representing koreans. Japanese studios are great at representing japanese. Czech studios are great at representing czechs. Polish studios are great at representing polish. Ukrainian studios are great at representing ukrainians. Russian studios are great at representing russians. As a minority, I do not feel I need representation from western studios, because there are already non-western studios that represent me."
"That's the thing. They don't want a diverse body of work. They want diversity in every single piece of work. There are games and manga targeted at girls, there are games and manga targeting boys. But they want to every single piece of work represent everybody. In the end representing nobody."
"They want every single piece of work to represent their world view, if the minorities they claim to care for refuse, they will turn on them or attack them."
Representation for minorities in western gaming is not necessary : r/KotakuInAction - "True, lol. If games were required to represent us accurately, I guess most main characters would be fat, lazy pieces of shit. I'm with you, let's do a character that is fun, not one that slavishly looks like me."  
Representation for minorities in western gaming is not necessary : r/KotakuInAction - "Yea I have adhd and I played veilguard recently where a character was clearly modelled off adhd (and googling confirmed it was a writer self-insert) and all it did was piss me off and make me feel like a caricature. Games are supposed to be the escape from that every day issue."
"It's that Asian elf right? Fuck man, as an Asian I hate how they've made elves multicultural. Elves are a western creation that are supposed to embody angelic like beings, why the fuck would they be squint-eyed and or melanin deprived??  Doesn't make sense"
"Asian culture have fox spirits and deer spirits which are way cooler than asian elves."

PayPal accused of racial bias against Asian Americans in funding program - "PayPal (PYPL.O) , opens new tab has been sued by an Asian American businesswoman who accused the digital payments company of racial bias for restricting part of a $535 million investment program to Black and Hispanic applicants, costing her millions of dollars. Thursday's complaint by Nisha Desai , opens new tab and her New York-based venture capital firm Andav Capital is part of a growing push among some conservatives to curtail diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in corporate America... Desai accused PayPal of violating Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bars racial bias in contracting; Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars federal funds recipients from allowing racial discrimination, and New York state and city human rights laws. She is seeking unspecified damages and to ban PayPal from considering race and ethnicity in its investment program. Desai sued after the federal appeals court in Manhattan said last March that the advocacy group Do No Harm lacked standing to pursue a similar case against drugmaker Pfizer (PFE.N) , opens new tab over a fellowship program for Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans, because it did not identify a member who was harmed."

‘Born-Again’ Chinese: Singapore’s PRC apologists

Tellingly, in a Singaporean forum where this was posted, the China shills got very upset.

Related: Explaining China Shill Psychology

‘Born-Again’ Chinese: Singapore’s PRC apologists

In the last decade or so, and especially since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic five years ago, there has been a growing trend of older, English-educated Singaporeans (usually, but not always, ethnic Chinese) embracing and propagating Chinese government propaganda. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 probably represents a high watermark of this trend, but affinity and support for China’s policy positions (say on the Ukraine war) are still evident today. Each time there is an online article by Channel News Asia or the Straits Times on the war in Ukraine, there would be numerous comments parroting the Russian and Chinese narrative that Russian aggression is justified because Ukraine or NATO provoked it.

Besides the war in Ukraine, Covid-19 also likely caused a dramatic increase in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda efforts abroad. In the first year of the pandemic, as one country after another failed to contain Covid, the Chinese propaganda machinery went into overdrive, trumpeting China’s success in viral suppression and pointing to it as proof of the superiority of Chinese governance. Later, as China persevered with zero-Covid while the rest of the world (including Singapore) shifted to living-with-Covid, Chinese state media denigrated other countries for “lying flat” in the “war against Covid”, and accused them of being reckless, callous, and Darwinian. 

After the pandemic, as the Chinese economy struggled to recover from zero-Covid, its apologists downplay the severity of the slowdown and the deflation pressures that China has been grappling with for nearly three years. They echo the (official) conspiracy theory that the pessimism surrounding the Chinese economy not only reflects the western media’s bias but is also part of a concerted campaign of “cognitive warfare” against China.

Living in Hong Kong, China, I have a material stake in China’s success. I’m pro-China in the sense that I would like the Chinese economy to overtake America’s to be the largest in the world. This would represent a reduction in global inequality (China having four times more people than the US) Since I teach mostly Chinese master students for a living, it would even be good for my own finances. But being pro-China does not require me to be naively optimistic about China’s trajectory or to overlook its economic problems and weaknesses. As a behaviourist, I’m also mindful of the optimism bias, the natural tendency for us to assume that our preferred scenarios are the likeliest. One should not conflate desirability with probability, much less inevitability. In fact, the more desirable an outcome is, the more we should ask how and why it might not occur. By seeking disconfirmation (rather than confirmation), we are less likely to be blindsided by our biases. Clearly, however, this is not how some of my fellow Singaporeans think as they triumphantly parrot CCP propaganda. 

Singapore’s authorities are not blasé about the risk of China apologists becoming a driver of polarisation in Singapore. In February 2024, the Ministry of Home Affairs designated Chan Man Ping Philip, a 59-year-old businessman naturalised Singaporean originally from Hong Kong, as a “politically significant person” under the Foreign Interference Countermeasures Act (FICA). In a media statement, the ministry said that “Chan has shown susceptibility to be influenced by foreign actors, and willingness to advance their interests.”

With older, Chinese-educated Singaporeans, it is hardly surprising that they should take pride in a resurgent China and a China that stands up to the west. After all, this generation of Chinese Singaporeans grew up on stories of China being humiliated and divided by western powers and Japan in the century preceding the Chinese civil war. Domestically, Chinese-educated Singaporeans have also laboured under a system that privileged the English-educated. What is less comprehensible is why some English-educated Singaporeans, many of whom can barely string together a cogent argument in Chinese, and who have a superficial understanding of Chinese history (even though they often claim otherwise), might hold similarly strident, pro-China views.

Compared with their Chinese-speaking counterparts, Anglophone Singaporeans who embrace China’s worldviews may be more effective in spreading Chinese propaganda in Singapore. Being culturally westernised, their praise of China is less expected and therefore received as more credible. They can thus be more potent in shaping public opinion in Singapore (whether they intend to or not). And with the second Donald Trump presidency in the United States likely to generate growing disappointment in and resentment toward the US in Singapore and other countries, these Singaporeans would find a more receptive audience and can more easily steer public opinion in Singapore in an anti-western, pro-China direction. 

BACs in Singapore

The Singaporean cultural studies scholar, Liew Kai Khiun, has used the term “born-again Chinese” to describe people of Chinese descent living outside of China (especially Singapore and Malaysia) who identify strongly with, and hold blindly optimistic views about, China. The term draws parallels with the “born-again” Christian phenomenon. Just as born-again Christians aren’t usually born Christian, born-again Chinese (BACs) may not be born Chinese or raised in a Chinese-speaking environment. Being educated in English, BACs usually have a poor command of the Chinese language and have little understanding of Chinese history and literature. Yet, like born-again Christians who are often more “public” about their faith than born Christians, BACs can be shriller and more strident than people who are born Chinese in defending their “motherland”.

Sociologists have long noted that diasporic or immigrant communities may sometimes identify more with their motherland even as they become more distant linguistically or culturally.  We see this in various settings. For example, third and fourth-generation Arabs in France or Germany whom we expect to be more assimilated by, and integrated with, their host societies, are often more conscious of their Arab (or Muslim) identities than first and second-generation immigrants. They may also be stricter in their observance of traditional practices (whether cultural or religious), or more conservative in their outlook, than their parents or grandparents.

This paradox can be explained by cultural alienation. In many immigrant societies, the failure of host societies to assimilate newer immigrant communities produces a profound disillusionment and resentment, leading these immigrants’ progeny – despite having been disconnected from their countries of origin for many generations – to find solace and meaning in the ethnic or religious identities of their ancestors, and to identify more with the countries and cultures their forefathers had left.

This is the identity politics of the right, one that is opposed to the identity politics of the left. Whereas the latter is about celebrating diversity or hybridity in all its forms (ethnic, cultural, gender, etc.), the former is about protecting an idealised, “pure” version of our (constructed) identities against threats, real or imagined. Cultural alienation – and the identity politics of the right it produces – is, arguably, the main force that enabled Brexit, Trump’s ascendancy, Putin’s irredentism, and the rise of far-right parties in many European countries.

In Singapore’s context, ethnic Chinese are the majority, but cultural alienation could also help explain the BAC phenomenon. In this case, it is an alienation from a western-dominated world. Despite years of operating in professional systems that are based on western norms, and in many cases excelling in the best western universities, many Singaporeans believe they are not accepted as equals by their western peers. Some seem to cope with this alienation (by the west) by finding meaning in an abstract, but highly performative, “Chineseness” that bears little semblance to a more rooted Chinese person’s sense of who he/she is. Shorn of the social, cultural, and linguistic realities that define the Chinese person in China, the BAC bases his recently discovered identity on the promise of China’s political and economic ascendancy – just as some born-again Christians base their newfound faith on the promise of material prosperity.

Without the ability to engage culturally or linguistically with his newfound Chinese identity, the BAC overcompensates with an idealised, romanticised idea of a China is that inevitably rising, that stands heroically against a hegemonic west (often represented by the evil US) – confident in his (BACs are usually men) belief that history is on China’s side. For BACs, President Xi Jinping’s proclamation that “the east is rising, and the west declining” thus evokes powerful emotions of ethnic pride, hubris, and manifest destiny. But as Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach (both cognitive scientists) say in The Knowledge Illusion, “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding.” We shouldn’t mistake BACs’ conviction for knowledge.

For instance, BACs in Singapore are mostly quite ignorant of the struggles facing highly educated Chinese youths in China today. Singaporeans who visit China are often bowled over by their world-leading modern infrastructure and by how digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) are widely applied. This appeals to our techno-utopian bias: the unquestioned belief that technology will solve all our problems, generate prosperity for everyone, and further the public interest. But as Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue persuasively in Power and Progress, whether technology benefits society is largely determined by how power is distributed and exercised. More often than not, technological progress generates riches, social respect, and political voice for those already powerful. “For most of the rest of us, there is the illusion of progress.”

China’s technological feats of marvel, often developed and deployed by the state, may also appeal to our authority bias, the tendency to view authority figures as more credible and respectable. This authority bias leads to a deference to (traditional) hierarchy. It explains why BACs find protests in China (say those in Hong Kong in 2019) offensive. It also feeds into a sense of cultural superiority in which these individuals believe they should be at, or near, the top; this may explain their discomfort with discussions about privilege.

Singaporean BACs are also mostly unaware of the long-term risks facing the Chinese economy: insufficient domestic demand and weak consumption growth in the last three years; stubborn deflation pressures and falling property prices; deleveraging caused by too much debt accumulated over the years by Chinese firms, households, and local governments; and a shrinking population since 2022. Convinced by by their religious-dogma-like belief in the inevitability of China’s rise, the BACs underestimate or ignore the Chinese economy’s growing headwinds and structural weaknesses (many of which are explained in my recent book on the Chinese economy, The Price of Zero: China’s Policy Missteps During and After Covid). To the extent that they acknowledge China’s slowdown in the last three years, they echo CCP propaganda in scapegoating the west.

Getting China wrong

BACs are thus defined by their unwavering faith in China’s ascent and their belief that its rise is inevitable. They present a triumphalist, Panglossian account of the China story. Perhaps the most well-known BAC in Singapore is the former Foreign Minister, George Yeo. At the height of the pandemic in October 2020, he proclaimed that China’s growth – supported by its Covid-suppression efforts and its dual circulation strategy (emphasising domestic demand) – was “virtually unstoppable”, and that after the pandemic was over, “the league tables will change dramatically” and “China will emerge much stronger.” Turns out he was almost completely off: China’s share of global GDP (in USD terms) fell from a peak of 18.3% in 2021 to 16.9% in 2023; it probably fell again (or did not increase much) in 2024. 

In recent years, terms like “peak China” and “China’s Japanification” have become mainstream among serious economists, reflecting a general view that China’s rise (in relative terms) has stalled. Further, the latest projections are that the Chinese economy will not overtake the US’ economy in the next 20 years, updating the earlier projection (made in 2019) that China will surpass the US in the early 2030s.

More importantly, the policies that George Yeo confidently said would underpin China’s post-Covid ascent — its dual circulation strategy and its successful efforts to contain Covid — have turned out to be the very things holding back China’s recovery. China’s zero-Covid policy scarred consumer and investor confidence long after the policy was abandoned, and the country’s consumption growth in the last three years has been tepid.

A second characteristic of BACs is that they attribute intentionality, rationality, and correctness to almost everything the Chinese state does. They are one of the CCP’s biggest cheerleaders; almost regardless of what the party does, it is correct. This belief fails Popper’s falsification test. As Karl Popper argued more than a century ago, if one cannot specify the conditions under which a statement that he/she is making is false, that statement is meaningless. Similarly, if one cannot state the conditions in which a policy is wrong, the statement that the said policy is a correct one is meaningless. Unfortunately for the BACs, their assumption that Chinese policy is always correct undermines their credibility. One might be more inclined to agree with them if they are willing to concede major errors by the Chinese authorities in recent years.

Take for instance how some of the BACs in Singapore defended the zero-Covid policy in China and criticised the Singapore government’s efforts to live with Covid from the middle of 2021. But when the Chinese authorities abruptly swung from a strict zero-COVID policy to a de facto COVID-for-everyone policy at the end of 2022 – leading to the very dystopia that Chinese state media had mocked other countries for – BACs applauded. A few months later, the Chinese authorities brazenly declared that China’s COVID-19 policy had been “completely correct” even as they scrubbed references to the tight restrictions that had traumatised its citizens and the economy for much of the pandemic. Justifying Chinese policies, as they lurch from one extreme to another, requires the BAC to engage in ever more contorted mental gymnastics.  

Third, the positions taken by the BACs are seldom based on principle, but on whatever the Chinese propaganda machine puts out. At the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, BACs argued that Russian operations in Ukraine were motivated by self-defence, by the broken promise that NATO wouldn’t expand eastwards, and by American interference in Ukraine. The BACs also suddenly discovered John Mearsheimer’s lecture from a decade ago about why the US shouldn’t poke the Russian bear, conveniently ignoring the fact that Mearsheimer’s main motivation is his belief that China is the real threat to the US and that the US should therefore find an accommodation with Russia to contain China. (A BAC told me that agreeing with Mearsheimer in opposing American support for Ukraine does not require him to agree with Mearsheimer’s view of China as the main threat.) They also accused the US of using Ukraine to fight a proxy war against Russia, and of being the real warmonger.

Now that Trump wants to withdraw US aid to Ukraine and end the war, consistency demands that these BACs support Trump’s actions. Why haven’t they done so? After all, Trump seems to be doing what Mearsheimer says America should do. I suspect the reason BACs have been reticent in their support of Trump is that the Chinese state is deeply suspicious of Trump’s efforts to make a deal with the Russians that could isolate China. The Chinese recently abstained from the UN vote on the Ukraine war even as the US backed Russia. This exposes the intellectual vacuity of the BACs’ position when they say they would like to see an end to the war in Ukraine. It seems that for the BACs, peace is desirable only if it does not involve Russia getting into bed with the US. And because that is probably bad for the Chinese state, BACs don’t welcome it.

Fourth, the BACs tend to view the world in binary terms: the good guys versus the bad guys. Geopolitics and geoeconomics are reduced to a simple morality play, in which good (eventually) triumphs. This binary bias is understandable; it is what we were told as children, and it helps people deal with a complex and often ambiguous reality. And with ample evidence of Trump bullying other countries, the BAC’s simplistic but increasingly resonant story of the US as the bad guy and China as the good guy gains traction. When someone points out that what China does is undesirable or bad, the BAC’s instinctive response is to engage in whataboutism: but the US is worse. 

Fifth, at the heart of the optimism bias of the BACs is their unshakeable belief that the Chinese state is exceptional and exceptionally ethical. For the BACs, China’s leaders are unusually intelligent, far-sighted, and meritocratic; they formulate policies rationally based on science and evidence. It is also a government for the people rather than one captured by vested interests. Viewing the Chinese government through this prism of exceptionalism makes it hard for China bulls to imagine that the authorities might be unpredictable, capricious, and prone to sudden U-turns (whether on Covid policy or one economic stimulus). Hence, when the policy reversals and U-turns occur, BACs must construct elaborate, often implausible theories to “explain” them. Not doing so would cause too much cognitive dissonance.

The reality of course is that the Chinese state is not all that exceptional or ethical. Like the governments of other countries, it is often myopic and torn between short- and long-term goals; ideology and loyalty regularly come into conflict with rational, evidence-based decision-making in the public interest; and there is often a large gap between (legitimate) policy goals and the Chinese state’s capacity to achieve those goals. In short, the reason BACs often get it wrong is that the authorities they feel compelled to defend and justify often get it wrong too.

Inoculating society against BACs

I have come to realise that trying to reason with these BACs is as much of a fool’s errand as trying to reason with diehard anti-vaxxers: they do not let facts get in the way of their good stories. Behavioural science also highlights the backfire effect – the more one tries to persuade a person with strong beliefs with logical argument, the more resistance the persuader is likely to face.

It is far more fruitful for those of us who are more sceptical of big countries, their motivations, and their actions to inoculate the wider public against BACs. The same applies to the Singapore authorities: rather than try to silence or suppress the BACs in Singapore, it’s much better for the state to inoculate citizens against BAC propaganda and so limit the amount of polarisation that BACs can cause. Using the state’s repressive arsenal of tools against BACs may be tempting but is likely to be counterproductive as that could breed public sympathy, support for the views propagated by the BACs, and suspicion that there is some uncomfortable truth behind BAC claims. 

Perhaps the most powerful (but not necessarily the most practical) way of inoculating people against one-sided positions is to require them to have skin in the game. A vivid demonstration of this occurred last year, when a Singaporean hedge fund manager, Chua Soon Hock, had to shut down his fund after suffering an “unprecedented drawdown” following China’s stock market rout and Japan’s rally at the start of the year. Chua, a well-known China bull in Singapore’s investment industry, had bet heavily on Hong Kong and China equities while shorting the Nikkei. In January 2024, both markets moved in the opposite directions from what he had predicted. “I have reached the stage whereby my confidence as a trader is lost,” Chua was reported to have written to his investors. He said that tough trading since October 2023 and a “disastrous” January “have proven that my past experience is no longer valid and instead, is working against me”.

Obviously, it’s not realistic to require people to invest according to their political biases. But this is a simple test that most people can grasp: unless someone who holds strong views (say of China’s ascendance) has bet accordingly in a meaningful manner, we shouldn’t take his/her views seriously. For instance, my favourite response to BACs now is, “How much did you put in Chinese stocks in the last five years?”.

A second practical suggestion is for all of us to interact more with mainlanders in Singapore. Such interactions will naturally help us avoid essentialising or stereotyping the Chinese people. Since my arrival in Hong Kong more than six years ago, I have had the privilege of teaching, engaging with, and learning from hundreds of bright Chinese youths. Their views of China’s future are diverse and multi-faceted; they find the blindly optimistic views of the BACs in Singapore quite laughable. Some of them even asked me why well-educated Singaporeans who do not live inside the Chinese propaganda bubble would parrot the views of CCP propagandists. 

Finally, we should all try to think more in terms of scenarios and less in terms of predictions. Stripped of its jargon, scenario thinking is simply a way of thinking probabilistically about the future; it’s an exercise in coming up with various plausible futures. While our predictions reflect and reinforce our prior beliefs, scenario thinking helps us to question (or at least suspend temporarily) our assumptions and biases (such as the excessive optimism and confirmation). The Institut Montaigne, a French think-tank in Paris, recently published an excellent set of scenarios on China and its relations with the world. Faced with increasing uncertainty, our ability (as individuals and as society) to think in terms of scenarios is indispensable.

 

Links - 13th March 2025 (1 - Donald Trump)

Chief Nerd on X - "Colbert cuts off Claire Danes before she spills the tea about the intelligence community “allying itself” with the legacy media during Trump’s first term. Watch until the end…"

LisaToddSutton 💙🌻 on X - "Is anyone going to fight back?  It appears everyone is laying down and acquiescing.  Harris went back to VP land without a murmur, Schiff's motto lets be friends while, Fetterman wants to pardon Trump, and Wray said I'm outta here,  ABC just bent a knee to Trump.   Trump and Musk are out to destroy the government did that not sink in yet?  Anyone?"
Election denial is only bad when it hurts the left wing agenda

Van Jones admits Donald Trump is 'smarter than me, you, and all of his critics': 'We're the idiots' - "Democrats have long derided Donald Trump as a vulgar fool.  But former Obama adviser Van Jones thinks otherwise.  In a recent interview, the progressive CNN commentator not only called Mr. Trump the smartest man in the room but said that his party has to do better than that in explaining why it lost to him. “Guys, can we cut it out? Donald Trump is not an idiot. Let me just be very clear. Donald Trump is smarter than me, you, and all of his critics,” Mr. Jones told CNN reporter Chris Cilizza in an interview on Mr. Cilizza’s YouTube channel.  “You know how I know? Because he has the White House, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, the popular vote,” Mr. Jones said.  There’s just no arguing with his success, winning a presidential election in the face of overt mainstream media hostility and other huge headwinds, he said...   ’The Democrats’ strategy of hostility toward Mr. Trump and contempt for his supporters is just a losing formula, Mr. Jones said.  “We’re the idiots,” he said. “We lost. So we have to go back in the locker room and we have to sit down and figure out how in the hell did we get beat.  “And when you look at it closely, it’s the arrogance, it’s the elitism, it’s not respecting people, it’s not listening to people,” Mr. Jones explained."
The left just doubles down and calls most of the country fascists, so good luck

Stephanopoulos Said ‘Rape’ After Exec Producer Warned Him Not To ‘So Many Times’: Report - "ABC News shelled out $16 million to settle a lawsuit after longtime anchor George Stephanopoulos made a demonstrably false statement on the air about President-elect Donald Trump, saying that he had been held “liable for rape.” And according to a new report from the New York Post, the former Democratic strategist was repeatedly warned not to use the word “rape” before the segment aired.  Stephanopoulos was hosting the network’s flagship Sunday morning political show “This Week” – and speaking to guest Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) — when he challenged Mace to defend Trump despite the verdict in the E. Jean Carroll case, in which Trump was found liable for sexual abuse but not rape... Behind the scenes, the Post reported, ABC staffers are referring to the “humiliated” anchor as “Furious George” and questioning the wisdom of allowing him to continue to cover a second Trump administration: “Everyone seems to be asking that question except ABC brass.”"
All the left wingers sharing that meme about Trump being a rapist/racist and similar nonsense didn't get the memo

Meme - The Atheist Socialist: "I really really do.
Edit: the democrats lost because they were too soft on Trump and Republicans. They lost because they give into what Republicans want. Republicans pretend to be against the status quo, but they ARE the status quo. Really, they're just against equality for LGBT people, women, and POC. This isn't the party of joy. I've never claimed to be part of the Democrats, because I am not. I am the party of wrath and justice, something Republicans need to face.  Inclusion does not mean we accept hateful bigots like Trump or his supporters. Tolerance does not mean tolerating bigotry. Love doesn't mean loving bigots.  Trump and his supporters want people like me dead. They want people I love to die. Their policies will directly lead to that. If this post upsets you more than rhetoric and policies that actually kill people, YOU are part of the problem."
*Wheel of Fortune* "I HOP_ H_ DI_S" (I HOPE HE DIES)
Time to arrest "far right extremists" for promoting violence

CAMPUS WATCH: Controversial uOttawa prof under fire for Trump-Netanyahu post - "A controversial University of Ottawa professor is being accused of calling for the assassination of former U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  Amir Attaran, a professor in the Ottawa university’s law and epidemiology faculties, posted on X that he’d “like to see the Secret Service fail again” in response to the two leaders meeting... Canadian university professors have faced criticism online for posts expressing disappointment over Trump’s survival of an attempt on his life. “Damn, so close. Too bad,” posted University of British Columbia medicine professor Karen Pinder after the assassination attempt. “What a glorious day this could have been.”  UBC animal care researcher Ingrid Barta meanwhile had posted, “Damnit, so close! And now he’ll milk being a victim for more votes. I reeeeally wish the person had better aim.”  This is also not the first time that Attaran’s social media posts have caused controversy.  Back in 2022, Attaran faced international backlash for shaming a United Airlines flight attendant on social media for not wearing a mask.  His shaming came amidst an air-travel mask mandate having been lifted in the U.S., but not in Canada. The different policies had created confusion for non-Canadian airlines, many of whom chose to no longer enforce a mask mandate on their flights to and from Canada."
More proof that Trump incites violence and needs to be arrested!

Meme - Amy Klobuchar @amyklobuchar: "Four years ago, the electoral vote certification was interrupted by a violent mob. Police officers were injured and killed. Our democracy hung in the balance. I knew we had to do our duty and complete the count - and in the early hours of January we did."
Readers added context: "No officers were killed. The medical examiner found Sicknick died of natural causes which means "a disease alone causes death. If death is hastened by an injury, the manner of death is not considered natural." Four other officers committed suicide days to months later."

Acyn on X - "Trump: They want very, very little water to go into your dishwasher, almost none. And you know what people do? They just keep pressing, pressing, pressing, keep it going. They end up using more water. Likewise, washing machines."
Noah Smith 🐇 on X - "He's not speaking coherently, but he's actually correct. When you restrict water flow to dishwashers, people run the dishwasher more times, and it's ultimately more wasteful. In his first term, Trump did the right thing by lifting regulations on dishwasher water use."

Meme - America: "Want to join us?"
Tradwife Greenland: "Yes!"
Ugly Fat Woman Denmark: "She's not interested!"

Mollie on X - "Mildly funny how media and other top Democrats have been calling Trump a convicted felon since May of last year, incorrectly, so that now that the sentencing happened, them shrieking 'You can officially call him a convicted felon now!' seems like extremely old news."
Brit Hume on X - "I think Trump's enemies have gotten all the mileage they ever will out of this dubious conviction. It was intended to keep him from being elected again and it failed. People will now judge him based on what he now does, not what may have done before."

Scott Adams on X - "Persuason Tip: Next time a Democrat says Trump is a felon, agree completely and tell them how much he reminds you of Nelson Mandela. Then wait for "But....but...Mendela was unfairly prosecuted." Just smile."

O’Keefe Media Group on X - "BREAKING VIDEO: Top Pentagon Advisor Reveals On Hidden Camera Conversation “with a Couple of Retired Generals to Explore What We Can Do” to ‘Protect People from Trump’ Confirms Secret Meetings regarding AI: “That is sensitive information… We’re going to have to keep it between us…”"
AwakenedOutlaw⚒️ on X - "Holy shit is this bad.    For starters, the Generals and Admirals he's talking about - their careers are over.  Secondly, he and EVERYONE he's talked to, especially everyone at that meeting he mentioned occurring in a SCIF at the Pentagon, all will be named and face an inquiry.  They can't NOT be.  No one elected Pentagon appointees and military officers to conspire against the President of the United States - and most certainly not while on duty at the MTFKN Pentagon.  This is treason."
It's only Treason if it hinders the left wing agenda

Grant Slatton on X - "trump has a really simple interpersonal algorithm. you praise him, he praises you. you attack him, he attacks you. mfw he has independently discovered the game theory optimal strategy"

Christian Collins on X - "Billionaire George Soros recently bought 200+ radio stations in 40 markets with 165 million listeners. Joe Biden's FCC fast-tracked the deal before the November election. Remember this when Democrats claim an "oligarchy" will form in Trump's America."

Aaron Rupar on X - "Biden: "I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. That's the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra wealthy people and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape""
Batya Ungar-Sargon on X - "Trump won folks making under $100K while the Dems won those making over $100K. Biden had 2 billionaires to every 1 Trump had. 75% of hedge funders gave to Kamala. 9/10 richest counties and 65% making over $500K are rep'd by Dems. Every accusation from Democrats is a confession."

Sean T at RCP on X - "To understand the Right re J6: They believe that the reason the dividing line between J6 getting prosecuted and, say, Portland rioters not is because norms are set by liberals to protect liberal ingroups while allowing the prosecution of outgroups."
Thread by @AceofSpadesHQ on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "this is fine, but I'll explain it as someone actually on the right. For fifty years we on the right have been told we cannot punish leftwing rioters, because the First Amendment is so important that we cannot come within miles of *appearing* to punish speech.
Now we were always frustrated by this "rule," and we wouldn't have chosen this "rule" if anyone had asked us (and of course no one ever does), but we did accept, grudgingly, that this was the rule: Speech is so important we must tolerate some violent "speech." We always doubted this "rule" would protect US if WE engaged in the violent "speech" favored by Democrat client groups, but until J6, we had no PROOF that the "rule" did not also protect us. Then, of course, J6 happened and the left became the most bloodthirsty Jalvert-like hounds of merciless justice. They proved to us once and for all the "rule" we never agreed to wasn't even a "rule," but just another special privilege of Democrat ally-groups. So we now want the benefit of this "rule," and also, once the j6ers are pardoned, we want to begin applying the "merciless justice" model to all of the leftwing groups who have burned cities and beaten up cops for 50 years, too."

Varad Mehta on X - "The moment a J6er got a longer sentence than a guy who murdered someone in a BLM riot by setting his shop on fire and leaving him to die, what Trump did last night was written in stone. It was a done deal, and there was no other outcome. I tried to warn you all. Here we are."

Andy Ngo on X - "Nejourde "Jord" Meacham, of Pleasant Valley, Utah, was charged in July 2023 for misdemeanor crimes related to walking inside the capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.   Several weeks later, the 22-year-old committed s—icide by shooting himself in the head.   He is among five Jan. 6 defendants who k—lled themselves during the prosecution and media pile-on. Leftists online encouraged Jan. 6 attendees identified online to k—ll themselves.   Meacham was posthumously pardoned by President Trump on Jan. 20, 2025."

The Daily Sneed™ on X - "U.S. embassy, Mexico City
Trump status: annihilated"
memetic_sisyphus on X - "Mexicans living in Mexico protesting another country’s leader for telling them to live in Mexico."

Stephen L. Miller on X - "I commented on this on a podcast. They created the argument about "losing the popular vote", a meaningless metric (also meant as election denialism)   Then Trump wins the popular vote and they move the goalposts to "well he barely won the popular vote."   They literally hedged on an imaginary concept that they came up with themselves. It's astonishing... If a Republican won 48 states, Ezra Klein and The NY Times would claim the president doesn't have a mandate because he didn't win all 50."

Meme - Thank you Joe Biden @IvanasStairCam: "What Trump says: I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!
What he means and what MAGA hears: KILL HER!"
Thank you Joe Biden @lvanasStairCam: "I HATE DONALD TRUMP!"

Meme - bettemidler @BetteMidler: "Can you imagine what would have happened if Hillary Clinton had claimed the election was stolen?"
Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok: "Like this?
NEW CLINTON COMPLAINING. HILLARY CLAIMS 2016 ELECTION WAS "STOLEN" FROM HER"

Greg Price on X - "Biden: "I want to warn the country [about] concentrated power in the hands of a few ultra wealthy people." Last week, he gave our nation's highest civilian honor to George Soros."
𝙺𝚒𝚖𝚋𝚊𝚕 𝙼𝚞𝚜𝚔 🤠 on X - "It’s also good to double check what politicians say. Kamala was supported by 83 billionaires. Trump was supported by 52. If there really is a fear of the wealthy influencing our elections, maybe they should do some self-reflection first."

Jake 🇺🇸 on X - "Impossible to overestimate how many people have been driven to Trump or at least away from the Dems by the abuses of the academic/activist left.  Just this week, I learned of two lifelong Dems—social science prof and humanities prof—who've gone full MAGA as a result of what they witnessed or endured.   I know of many others, myself included, who, while unable to countenance Trump, have gone from loyal Dems to reviling the party. Indeed, a former student, a black man FWIW, reports that he dutifully voted Harris but was surprised to find himself secretly relieved when she lost.  The wound that the overweening American left has inflicted upon itself, and the empowerment that it has gifted a party which it officially regards as an existential fascist threat, surely amounts to one of history's most egregious own-goals."

KanekoaTheGreat on X - "NEW: Tech billionaire and lifelong Democrat Mark Pincus reveals his "Red Pill" moment, sparked by Mike Solana's Pirate Wires and the "very fine people" hoax, culminating in him voting for Donald Trump.
"I started reading @PirateWires  and @micsolana , and I thought he was a little crazy at first because he would write these articles, and one he wrote was about how the Ukrainian soldiers had swastikas on their helmets, and the NYT photographers would ask them to take the swastikas off for photos."   "I said that can't be true, and then four months later, it was in the NYT buried in the middle of the paper, and I kept seeing stories like that that he would be early on. So, I started feeling more uncomfortable and queasy with what was going on with mainstream media."  "Then, in May 2024, I read an article that talked about Trump's speech in Charlottesville, where he said there are good people on both sides, and the article said it was completely propaganda and didn't actually reflect what he said. That he denounced the Nazis a bunch of times in his speech, so then I went and watched that video, and that was my red pill moment."   "I think it was for a lot of people because it wasn't just the media or politicians spinning it. That speech was one of the pillars of why you were supposed to hate Trump. Then you see Biden say that's why he had to run a second time, and Obama says it, and Biden brings it up again at the DNC."   "They clearly know they are misrepresenting things, so for me, that was beyond uncomfortable. Now, I have to go back to first principles and look at the primary data, listen to only original speeches by people, and I just realized I couldn't trust the mainstream media."
What was your Red Pill moment?  Drop your story in the comments.👇"

Meme - "Miranda Bryant"
"Hi Arthur, I am a reporter for the Guardian. I am the CEO of the Hotel Hans Egede, who told me that Donald Trump Jr invited "homeless people and drug dealers" he had met on the streets of Nuuk who had no idea who he was for a free lunch to make it look like they were supporters of his father. Does Donald Trump Jr have any comment on this? If so, please get back to me ASAP today. Thanks, Miranda Bryant"
"That's pretty wild. Did the hotel CEO provide any actual evidence that Don did that or are you just planning to run an unsubstantiated claim with no evidence to corroborate it?"
"Hi, thanks so much for your message. Does he dispute the hotel CEO's claims?"
"You tell me. Do you think Donald Trump Jr was wandering around Greenland inviting homeless people and drug addicts to a lunch, or do you realize that the suggestion sounds so beyond the pale ridiculous that you should feel stupid even asking the question? There were cameras following him around from the second he got there to the second he left. Did they miss him recruiting homeless people and drug addicts to his homeless person / drug addict lunch? Are u fucking retarded?"

Thread by @ulriklykke on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I’m Danish.  I’m strongly in favour of striking a deal with Trump regarding Greenland.  Today, the state of Greenland is a mess economically and sociologically.  Here’s the big lines of why a deal with the United States is a win-win-win 🧵:
First off, it's important to understand just how massive Greenland is.  At 836,300 square miles:
• It could fit Germany inside 6 times
• It is larger than Alaska and Texas combined.
• From north to south, it spans over 2,670 km
Vast unharvested potential.
Greenland is a small economy and currently heavily dependent on Denmark.  Greenland's GDP is around $3B.  Greenland is heavily dependent on Denmark and receives a yearly subsidy of ~$600 million.  Denmark also provides infrastructure support and is responsible for Greenland’s defence. Greenland has around 55.000 inhabitants and a total workforce of around 27.000.  The unemployment rate is 3.7%, the lowest in recent years.  This is good for the economy but also makes it difficult for companies to attract qualified people. The backbone of Greenland's economy is its fishing industry which makes up for 98% of its exports.  Shrimp and halibut are the two most significant exports, with shrimp being the dominant catch.
Unfortunately, the island faces severe social issues:
· Highest rates of suicide in the world
· High murder rate and issues with domestic violence
· Highest alcohol consumption per capita worldwide
A stable future requires addressing root causes of these sad facts.
The country also has a big housing crisis:  The capital Nuuk has a shortage of 1,000+ homes, with 2,000+ people on waitlists for public housing.  High costs of housing is a key issue, as building in the Arctic is 30% more expensive. Greenland's vast territory is a treasure chest of untapped resources.  Greenland has:
• 38.5 million tons of rare earth oxides
• Massive uranium deposits
• Vast oil and gas reserves
• Precious metals
• Some of the world's largest fresh water reserves
And all of these could become available with the right partnerships.
However, exploring such partnerships is not only up to Greenland.  For nearly 200 years, Denmark held full control of the island.  It was not until 2009, Greenland gained self-rule, taking over most domestic affairs.  Today, an independence movement in Greenland is is challenging Denmark's claim on the territory. For context, Denmark is a small country of just 6 million people.  Despite being a wealthy country, the country is economically limited in its ability to support the development of Greenland.  Our country has neglected the opportunities and it now makes a lot of sense to explore partnership options. Meanwhile, Trump is not playing games:  Trump already displayed interest for acquiring Greenland in 2019.  At that time, his efforts quickly faded due to the corona pandemic.  However, this time around his aggression on the topic cannot be mistaken.  Allegedly, the House Republicans are also already drafting legislation to provide greenlight of the Greenland negotiations.
Why's Trump so interested in Greenland?  There's several big reasons. One of them is the untapped natural resources in the country.  But the U.S. interest in Greenland is also strategic:
• Control of Arctic resources and trade routes.
• Geopolitical influence in the Arctic
• Military presence in a key region
All of the above are becoming more relevant in the future.
However, the people of Greenland needs to be onboard.  A few days ago, Prime ministers of Denmark and Greenland said in a joint press conference that Greenland is ready to explore independence.  Additionally, a poll showed that the people of Greenland is supporting that decision:
🔴 Denmark Independence 68%
🔵 Stay Denmark 32%
The people of Greenland wants independence. Greenland’s path to independence could thrive with a free association with the U.S.  Here’s why:
• Access to investments for infrastructure and industry
• Strategic partnership in the Arctic
• Sovereignty while benefiting from U.S. economic and defense support
Greenland cannot achieve succesful independence without new partnerships or benefactors. That begs the question what the price tag of such arrangement will be?  The Wall Street Journal did some napkin math on matter and ends up around $50B.  In my mind, this figure stands as good baseline for a down-payment for the partnership.  However, for a fair deal to be arranged a hefty "rent" for military bases and royalties on mineral exploitation must also be included. A deal could benefit both Denmark, Greenland and the United States.
• United States wins dominance in a key territory.
• Denmark is relieved of a big economic burden.
• Greenland will benefit from massive investments for a better future.
All three countries should benefit heavily from the exploitation of the ressources. The deal is currently at a crossroad.  Trump is pursuing this aggressively.  Greenland seems open to discussion, and Denmark is currently playing it quiet via diplomatic ties.  Hopefully, a win-win-win is in the cards."

Andy Ngo on X - "Soros-funded Philadelphia @DA_LarryKrasner announced he is trying to file state charges against Jan. 6 defendants pardoned or commutated by Trump. In 2020, Krassner dropped around 95 percent of the BLM-Antifa riot cases in his office. Read:"

Bev Jackson on X - "I just watched @BBC  6-o-clock news. In a fairly extensive coverage of Trump’s first day, the Executive Order pardoning Jan 6th rioters was discussed at length. There was mention of the withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, plans to leave WHO, and plans to curb immigration.   Not one word about the most popular Executive Order: the acknowledgment of binary sex and the dismantlement of the entire apparatus of gender identity doctrine that has trashed women’s rights, negated LGB rights, and undermined child safeguarding.  It was this issue, more than any other, that swayed swing voters to switch from Democrat to Republican, and it led millions of lifelong Democrats to stay home in November. But the @BBC  - once again - doesn’t think it worth mentioning.  Shame on you, @BBC !"

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "I completely agree with this, but can't help noticing how online Democrats who never expressed concerns about Biden's age and mental deterioration are now yammering on and on about Trump's "obvious cognitive decline."   I agree that Trump is too old to be president, but to call his decline "obvious" when the zombie state of Biden (far worse than anything Trump has exhibited) was ignored is peak bad faith. Trump seems agile compared to Biden."
Andrew Yang🧢⬆️🇺🇸 @AndrewYang: "Guys if 81 is too old . . . so is 78.  78 to 82 are not peak years."

Opinion | Trump shows contempt for government and its workers - The Washington Post - "Trump’s second term is all about curtailing government’s power and reach."
Clear proof he is a fascist, because fascists aim to shrink government

Matt Van Swol on X - "I don't want to hear EVER AGAIN that the democrats care about "working people" President Trump just gave the people of Western North Carolina a giant microphone to tell their stories. He hugged them. He listened to them. He asked questions. BIDEN IGNORED US FOR 4 MONTHS!!!!!"

Links - 12th March 2025 (2 - Migrants: UK)

Alex Barnicoat on X - "If a two seater plane accidentally flies into British Airspace, the UK will scramble 2 $120 million Typhoon Fighter Jets to potentially shoot it down. But if a boat filled with 60 military age men arrives, who we don’t know, the UK pays for them to live here. Why is this?"

Mahdi Zaidan on X - "Yesterday I became British. I thought the ceremony will be nationalistic and a bit cringe until the lord mayor of Brighton started his speech with al salamu ‘alaykum"
The horror of a citizenship ceremony being nationalistic!
Clearly, anyone suggesting dual loyalty is racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic. Though really it's really a single loyalty (just not the one on paper)

Thread by @sarah_bool on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Today I asked the Government whether it is fair that undocumented illegal migrants get priority access to NHS services over British taxpayers. The response shows the Minister was clearly not aware of a scheme called "987 Inclusion Health" at University College London Hospital which allows undocumented migrants to get priority access to A&E services."

Steven Edginton on X - "New FOI data from 41/43 UK police forces finds: Foreigners 3.5x as likely to be arrested for sex offences than British citizens. In the City of London 2/3 of arrests for sex offences were foreigners. The arrest rate for Albanians is more than 200 per 1000 people"

Daily Mail Online on X - "I was sexually assaulted by a Deliveroo rider using a fake name - the app had no details for monster who attacked me in my home"
pagliacci the hated 🌝 on X - "just one month ago shitlibs on this site harassed a woman for a week straight after she said she reported food delivery drivers who didn’t match their profile because she felt it was a safety issue. they told her she was being a delusional Karen and putting migrant men at risk."
Time to blame white people!

Pound plunges after Bank of England cuts interest rates - "Mr Bailey said policymakers have been left with a puzzle, as the fall in Britain’s GDP comes despite an increase in the population.  He said: “We’ve got more population, we’ve got more labour force and we’ve got the same output.   “You can only conclude then that you’ve got low productivity.”  He added that it would be “very unusual” if negative productivity persisted."
Matt Goodwin on X - "Could opening Britain to mass, uncontrolled, low skill, low wage, non-selective immigration, often from impoverished nations, have anything to do with this I wonder?"
Weird. We keep being told that mass migration is good for the economy

Meme - Sam Ashworth-Hayes @SAshworthHayes: "I keep referring back to this case from 2010 as the best possible illustration of what the British state will wave through it you let it.  The housing benefit alone for this family was eating the total taxes - income tax, NI, VAT, duties, the lot - of 8 average households."
"Former asylum seeker on benefits given £2 million house. A family of former asylum seekers have moved into a £2.1 million home in one of the smartest areas of London at a cost to the taxpayer of £8,000 a month after complaining about living in a poor area."
Time to "tax the rich" to pay for endless migrants and hate on the Telegraph for reporting inconvenient facts

Rebecca on X - "In my 90% white town, I can walk around wearing all of my jewelry, a cashmere coat and a nice handbag with a wallet full of cash. I can leave my doors unlocked. I can leave my laptop in my car overnight and no one steals it. I accidentally left a scooter at the park…went back 3 days later and it was right where I left it. This is it what your life could be like without diversity."
Dan 🇬🇧 on X - "So many immigrants in the replies refusing to believe a high trust society ever existed. Its simply incomprehensible to them."

Pakistani paedophile escaped deportation because it would ‘harm his children’ - "A Pakistani father who was jailed for child sex offences escaped deportation because it would be “unduly harsh” on his children.  The unnamed father of two toddlers, who was granted anonymity by an immigration court, had been banned from living with his children since he was convicted of trying to get three “barely pubescent” girls to engage in sex and was jailed for 18 months.  However, a lower tribunal judge ruled that he should not be deported back to Pakistan because it would be “unduly harsh for the children to be without their father”... It is the latest case in which foreign criminals have been allowed to remain in the UK by immigration tribunals because they have ruled that deportation would breach their rights to a family life under article eight of the European Convention on Human Rights.  Others uncovered by The Telegraph include a Polish serial offender whose deportation was halted after a court ruled he was a father figure to his 12-year-old nephew, who would face a “disproportionate” impact if he was removed... the lower immigration tribunal judge who heard his appeal against deportation accepted that it would be “unduly harsh” to separate him from his children, whom he was being allowed to see for up to 12 hours a day under “supervised contact.”  The judge also “placed weight” on the wife’s claim that she felt partly responsible for his online grooming of the girls because she had not been able to have sex with him after being admitted to hospital to be treated for Covid.  The court was told: “Her guilt would be an additional burden and would detrimentally impact her ability to care for her children, albeit not at a level requiring social services intervention.”  The judge ruled: “In light of the above matters, considered cumulatively, I am satisfied that it would be unduly harsh for the children to be without their father.”"

Failed asylum seeker can stay in UK because she joined terror group - "A Nigerian woman who tried and failed eight times to secure asylum in Britain was finally granted the right to stay after joining a terrorist organisation just to boost her claim.  The judge who gave the 49-year-old woman the right to stay acknowledged that she was not being honest about her political beliefs and had become involved with the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) only “in order to create a claim for asylum”.  The woman, who came to the UK in 2011, joined IPOB in 2017. A separatist group that has been blamed for acts of violence against the Nigerian state, it has been banned as a terrorist organisation by Nigeria but is not proscribed in the UK.  Upper tribunal judge Gemma Loughran ruled that the asylum seeker’s activities on behalf of the group meant she had a “well-founded fear of persecution” under human rights laws due to her “imputed” political opinion... The Nigerian woman, who was granted anonymity, submitted eight different appeals against a rejection of her right to remain in the UK. They ranged from claims under ECHR Article Eight, which guarantees a right to a family life, to assertions she was a victim of trafficking.  They were all rejected over a 10-year period."

Illegal immigrant who stabbed wife to death wins right to stay in Britain after arguing he might have to face wrath of in-laws back home in Turkey - "An illegal immigrant who savagely stabbed his wife to death has won the right to stay in Britain – after arguing that he might have to face the anger of his in-laws back home in Turkey.  The convicted killer, who can only be named as KD, entered Britain illegally with his spouse in 2001 and had a political asylum application turned down.  Despite that, he was still here several years later and managing a kebab shop in London when he caught his wife chatting to another man online in 2005.   Infuriated by the chat and by the fact his wife had been wearing a low-cut top, KD stabbed her ten times, before calling friends to confess... a Jamaican thug ordered for deportation after being convicted in a horrific wounding case has been allowed to stay because his daughter was refusing to go to school.  Donovan Reid, 59, was jailed in 2022. The Home Office began deportation proceedings, but he appealed on human rights grounds."
Tom Jones on X - "Judges are now consistently ruling that Britain's immigration system should be used to protect foreign criminals from the consequences of their own actions. This cannot hold."

Albanian criminal's deportation halted over son's distaste for chicken nuggets - "An immigration tribunal ruled that it would be “unduly harsh” for the 10-year-old boy to be forced to move to Albania with his father owing to his sensitivity around food.  The sole example provided to the court was his distaste for the “type of chicken nuggets that are available abroad”.  As a result, the judge allowed the father’s appeal against deportation as a breach of his right to a family life under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), citing the impact his removal might have on his son... Sir Keir Starmer and his Attorney General have said that they will not withdraw from the ECHR and that the Government is committed to upholding the rule of international law.  Charles Hymas Home Affairs Editor. Tim Sigsworth. Sam Ashworth-Hayes Related Topics      Immigration, Migrants, Crime, Labour Party, Reform UK, Albania   09 February 2025 8:29pm GMT 4581  Criminal's deportation halted over chicken nuggets  An Albanian criminal was allowed to stay in Britain partly because his son will not eat foreign chicken nuggets, The Telegraph can reveal.  An immigration tribunal ruled that it would be “unduly harsh” for the 10-year-old boy to be forced to move to Albania with his father owing to his sensitivity around food.  The sole example provided to the court was his distaste for the “type of chicken nuggets that are available abroad”.  As a result, the judge allowed the father’s appeal against deportation as a breach of his right to a family life under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), citing the impact his removal might have on his son.  The case, revealed in court documents, is among a record 34,169 outstanding asylum appeals. The number represents a five-fold increase in two years from the 6,386 appeals outstanding at the same point in 2022.  The legal challenges, largely on human rights grounds, threaten to hold up Labour’s efforts to fast-track the removal of thousands of migrants with no right to remain in the UK.  They also risk undermining the Government’s efforts to appear tough on immigration in the face of the rise of Reform.  The revelations come as the Government launches a campaign to counter claims that Britain is a soft touch for migrants by announcing the results of a blitz on illegal working.  Data to be published on Monday show there were 609 arrests last month for illegal working, 73 per cent up on January 2024, and a 48 per cent rise in raids from 556 to 828.  The Home Office will also publish pictures and videos of migrants being deported from the UK and forcibly placed on planes.  It comes as both Labour and Tories are trying to head off the electoral threat from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, whose hardline “freeze” on non-essential immigration and turn back the boats plan has helped his party overtake both Tories and Labour and top the latest opinion polls.  Commenting on the chicken nuggets case, Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said it was “mind-boggling” that food was being used as an argument to prevent deportation.  “It’s ludicrous that a judge would entertain it. Cases like this make us a laughing stock.  “It’s an insult to the British public that our immigration laws are being abused in such an outrageous way,” he said.  Chris Philp, shadow home secretary, said: “This case shows how bogus asylum seekers and foreign criminals are ruthlessly exploiting human rights laws and weak judges to stay in the UK when common sense clearly shows they should be kicked out.”  A Home Office spokesman said: “Foreign nationals who commit heinous crimes should be in no doubt that we will do everything to make sure they are not free on Britain’s streets, including removal from the UK at the earliest possible opportunity.  “Since the election, we’ve removed 2,580 foreign criminals, a 23 per cent increase on the same period 12 months prior.”  Sir Keir Starmer and his Attorney General have said that they will not withdraw from the ECHR and that the Government is committed to upholding the rule of international law.  Albanian Klevis Disha, 39, came to the UK illegally in February 2001 as a 15-year-old unaccompanied child. He used a false name and falsely claimed to have been born in the former Yugoslavia.  Although his asylum claim was rejected, he secured UK citizenship in 2007 after being granted exceptional leave to remain, and then indefinite leave to remain... The judge, David Merrigan, said the only example of why the boy could not go to Albania was that he “will not eat the type of chicken nuggets that are available abroad”."

Thread by @lara_e_brown on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Having now read this case, it is even worse than is being reported.  The story involves 20 years of falsified documents, €300,000 of theft, and an endless appeal process. Chicken nuggets are just the tip of the iceberg.  Short 🧵
In 2001, the appellant (Mr Disha, an Albanian National) entered the country illegally.  He makes an asylum claim on the basis of political persecution.  Given this would be quite difficult to pull off from Albania (a safe country) he lies about being from Yugoslavia. Thankfully, his claim is rejected in September 2001 (8 months after it was filed) due to lack of any evidence he was being persecuted.  He appeals this decision, although this is withdrawn in March 2003. However, despite the fact that Mr Disha was lying about being persecuted, was not from Yugoslavia, and was probably using a fake name, somehow he gets Exceptional Leave to Remain in September 2005 and then Indefinite Leave to Remain.   In 2006, Mr Disha marries a naturalised British Citizen. They have two children - one born in 2009 and one in 2014.  Child C (2014) is central to Disha's case, in part due to the grounds he dislikes Albanian chicken nuggets. In 2017 Mr Disha is sentenced to two years in prison for acquisition of, or of possession of criminal property.  He is found with €300,000 in cash on his person, which is later determine to be the profits of crime.  After spending just two years in prison, the Home Office begin a 'deprivation of Citizenship' process in 2019.  Two more years later, in 2021, Mr Disha is deprived of UK Citizenship on the grounds he acquired it through deception. In 2021 Mr Disha begins a lengthy appeals process which will have cost the taxpayer huge amounts of money.  He claims the deportation order goes against his 'human rights'. The judge allows this appeal on 'human rights grounds'.  She decides that it would be 'unduly harsh' to ask child C to either move with Mr Disha to Albania, or stay with his mother if she chose to remain in the UK. The judge's decision rests on child C's 'educational needs'.  Key facts about this claim:
1) Child C has no formal diagnosis
2) There is no professional assessment of whether their needs could be met in Albania
3) CAHMS have said they don't meet the threshold for support
4) Child C hasn't seen a proper educational psychologist. Just a trainee who provides no CV
5) The school's educational report only lists 'emotional regulation, independence; reading and writing' where Child C needs support
6/ Much of the evidence of Child C's educational needs relies just on a letter written by a neighbour to the court claiming they have 'special needs' and another by a family friend claiming Mr Disha has been 'supportive' in helping Child C 'trying to get a diagnosis.
The judge rules Mr Nisha is important to Child C's life because he eats with the family, helps the child with emotional regulation and 'spends time with him playing Lego figures'. This is where the chicken nugget claim comes in.  As part of the evidence Child C has special needs, it is claimed that they 'will not eat the type of chicken nuggets that are available abroad' Thankfully, the upper-tribunal found that this bizarre case 'involved the making of an error of law'.  Does this mean the criminal can finally be deported? Not necessarily.  We will now go back round again with a different First-tier Tribunal judge making a new ruling.
The system is totally broken.  The Government don't publish First-tier Tribunal decisions. We don't see the outcome of most of these cases.  A criminal with falsified documents, who lied in their asylum claim, should never have been allowed to stay for 20 years. We urgently need reform - of the tribunal system, the ECHR, and how we process these claims."

Slovakian jailed over shovel attack allowed to stay in UK after rehabilitation claim - "A Slovakian jailed over a shovel attack on a woman during a violent brawl has been allowed to stay in Britain after claiming he has been “rehabilitated”.  The 22-year-old was jailed for 15 months for his part in an attack on another group of Slovakian party-goers with shovels, sticks, bats and metal bars in a car park after an event at a community centre in Stoke-on-Trent.  A woman was hit to the floor with the shovel in what a judge described as a “large-scale incident of serious public disorder” where men and women were attacked, “put in real fear” and victims kicked while on the ground leaving them with multiple injuries.  The Home Office sought the man’s deportation as a “serious threat to the public”. He also had three previous convictions for threats, abuse and driving while disqualified.  However, the deportation was blocked by Christopher John Hanson, an upper immigration tribunal judge, who said the Slovakian’s “rehabilitation appears to have been very successful as evidenced by the lack of further offending”.  The judge admitted that because the offence was committed when the UK was still in the EU, it was harder to expel him... The Slovakian, who was granted anonymity, was said to have a short temper and propensity to violence when drunk. He supplied some of the weapons from his van after an incident on the dance floor escalated into violence. They included a metal bar, cricket bat and shovel that came from his brother’s car.  The court was told: “It is difficult to believe that these objects were placed in the boot for any other reason than to be used as weapons should the need arise.  “This evidences intent and may indicate that some members of his family are well-versed in violence and the use of weapons.”"

Asylum seekers allowed to stay in UK despite lying in claims - "Immigration judges have accepted that migrants challenging their removal have deliberately lied or provided evidence that was “not credible”, but have still granted them the right to remain under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).  One judge allowed a 54-year-old Zimbabwean woman’s appeal against deportation, despite evidence that she would “do and say almost anything to try to fabricate a means to remain in the UK”.  Convicted for deception in a previous asylum claim, the woman later concocted a political blog criticising the Zimbabwe regime so that she could claim she would be persecuted if returned.  Another illegal migrant escaped deportation despite “lies” about how few relatives he had in his home country of Sri Lanka, told as part of his legal argument that it would breach his rights to a family life under the ECHR to be returned there. In backing 52-year-old Puspam Elangeeran’s appeal against deportation, judges cited a previous ruling which stated that “any court or tribunal must be very careful not to dismiss an appeal just because an appellant has told lies”... The upper immigration tribunal judges backed Mr Elangeeran’s claim on the basis that he had been in the UK since 2000, having mounted successive appeals against deportation.  They ruled it would be “unjustifiably harsh” to return him to Sri Lanka, given the length of time he had lived in Britain... Like Mr Elangeeran, the 54-year-old Zimbabwean had made a series of applications to try to remain in the UK since she arrived as a student in March 2001. This included a fraudulent claim for recognition of right to abode, for which she was jailed for 18 months in 2009.  She made subsequent human rights claims to stay in 2009, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2022 before she was refused in 2023... a Somali found to have lied about fleeing Al Shabaab, the Islamist terror group, was spared deportation and an unnamed man from Gaza was allowed to stay in the UK despite having an initial asylum claim rejected after lying that his life was in danger at home.  Court documents reveal a judge ruled the Gazan man’s 2022 account was “not credible” and he had actually come to the UK “as an economic migrant” – but an upper tribunal decided the judge was wrong to have rejected his appeal."

Drug dealer allowed to stay in Britain after promising to only smoke cannabis - "Jamaican Shawn Rickford McLeod, 40, who came to Britain in 2000 was issued with a deportation order after being jailed for three years and four months for three counts of supplying class A drugs.  He appealed the order on the grounds that it would breach his rights to a family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as he had three young children in the UK with his wife.  Judge David Chaim Brannan at a lower immigration tribunal ruled in his favour, finding that deportation would be “unduly harsh” on his children and that “he genuinely wants to avoid reoffending (except for cannabis use) so he can care for his children”.  McLeod told both his prison and probation officers overseeing his release on licence as well as Judge Brannan that “he intended to continue to use cannabis” irrespective of whether he was allowed to remain in the country."

Iraqi asylum seeker allowed to stay in UK after mother refuses to hand over ID - "An Iraqi asylum seeker has been allowed to remain in the UK after his mother refused to hand over an ID document that would enable him to return to his home country.  The man claimed in 2021 that his safety was at risk if he returned to Iraq because he had been threatened, kidnapped and beaten by the owners of a car that he had been commissioned to repair.  His appeal against the rejection of his asylum was initially thrown out on the basis that it was now four years since the attack and his safety was no longer at risk if he returned.  But an upper immigration tribunal overruled that decision after accepting that his mother, who lives in Iraq, was refusing to hand over the civil status identity card (CSID) he needed to return on the basis that she believed his life was still at risk. CJ Williams, the deputy judge on the case, ruled that it would be too dangerous for the man to try to return to Iraq without any ID documentation and granted his appeal under article three of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).  Article three states that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in all circumstances”."

Court gives Gazans right to settle in UK - "Palestinian migrants have been granted the right to live in the UK after applying through a scheme meant for Ukrainian refugees.  A family of six seeking to flee Gaza have been allowed to join their brother in Britain after an immigration judge ruled that the Home Office’s rejection of their application breached their human rights.  The family had made their application through the Ukraine Family Scheme and the decision to accept their case came despite warnings by lawyers for the Home Office that it could open the floodgates to “the admission of all those in conflict zones with family in the UK”... The Ukraine Family Scheme, set up in March 2022, allowed Ukrainian nationals and their family members to come to the UK if they had a relative who was a British citizen or settled in the UK. Some 72,000 visas were issued before it closed last February.  The family’s claim was initially refused by a lower-tier immigration tribunal on the basis that it was outside the Ukraine programme’s rules, and that it was for Parliament to decide which countries should benefit from resettlement schemes. However, Hugo Norton-Taylor, an upper tribunal judge, overturned that decision and granted the Palestinians’ appeal, allowing them to come to the UK on the basis of their Article 8 right to a family life under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).  He said the rights of the individual family who were in an “extreme and life threatening” situation outweighed the “public interest” of the rules on entry to the UK, which were designed to limit resettlement schemes and control immigration...   The case, revealed in court documents, sparked criticism on Tuesday. Mr Philp said it was an “alarming and dangerous” judgment, which created “a basis for anyone in any conflict zone anywhere in the world with relations in the UK to come here”.  “There are two million people in Gaza alone and tens of millions around the world in conflict zones, many of whom will have relations living in the UK. We obviously cannot accommodate all of them,” he said.  “The UK has generously helped people in Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan and Hong Kong with specific humanitarian schemes. We cannot have judges simply making up new schemes based on novel and expansive interpretations of human rights law.  “It is clearer than ever that radical changes to human rights laws are needed – so Parliament, and not judges, make decisions about eligibility to come to the UK. Now there is a ceasefire in Gaza, I hope that the Government appeals this decision based on the new facts on the ground.”"
When you basically have open borders for anyone from a "conflict zone"

Lord Hermer claimed pledge to ‘control our borders’ was de-humanising - "The attorney-general said that pledges to “control our borders” are de-humanising and there is a “moral argument” for Britain to pay reparations for slavery, in comments which put him at odds with key government positions... In podcasts hosted before he entered government, Lord Hermer repeatedly hit out at Donald Trump — dubbing the US president “the orange tyrant” — and said every education secretary should be forced to read about violence in the British Empire when taking office. Hermer, a close friend of the prime minister’s, has been in the crosshairs of some Cabinet ministers after The Times revealed how colleagues had accused him of creating a “freeze on government” with a “finickity” interpretation of the law. Others have blamed the attorney-general for legal advice given in relation to the deal to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius... both Starmer and Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, have made pledges to “control our borders” in their bid to tackle the migration crisis. But in one podcast episode, released in January 2024, Hermer said he was “acutely conscious that slogans such as stop the boats, control our borders, so on and so on, are capable not only of being distracting, but also de-humanising.” On Wednesday, the polling firm YouGov found that the majority of people thought the government’s immigration policy was not sufficiently robust. Some 56 per cent said the policy was not strict enough, 7 per cent said too strict, 14 per cent said about right and 23 per cent said they didn’t know... In May 2023, in a discussion over new protest laws designed to crack down on disruptive marches by groups such as Just Stop Oil, Hermer said those taking to the streets were “inspiring”... Three months later, Starmer said such methods were “contemptible” and later said climate protestors taking part in disruptive action needed to “feel the full force of the law”."
The institutional bias is clear

Sam Ashworth-Hayes on X - "It's worth noting the UK public sector can pay decent wages, it just does so for its priorities. The head of cybersecurity at the Treasury gets £58,000, but "Strategic Director Housing" at Hackney Council gets £149,000. Putting people in subsidised homes (and in particular, immigrants - 56% of Hackney social housing has a non UK born reference person) is more central to the British state than keeping the Treasury functioning."

Ian Miles Cheong on X - "British religious scholar Abu Waleed says it’s necessary to impose humiliating laws for non-Muslims in Britain and convert them."

Connor Tomlinson on X - "This happens every time I get a train into London. Someone either on speakerphone, or playing music or TikToks aloud. And nobody dare ask him to put headphones in, because you don't know how someone with "PSYCHO" will react -- or if he'll even speak English. Death-by-a-thousand-cuts to a high-trust society."
Nick Dixon on X - "Has anyone figured out why the immigrants don’t use headphones? My best guess is they simply have no concept of the public space, so it doesn’t occur to them. They must see others using them, but presumably just dimly register it as another weird feature of a culture they hate."

Global Dissident on X - "BREAKING: A 16-year-old boy was stabbed in Birmingham and rushed to hospital with serious injuries. 🚨🇬🇧 Later, chaos broke out at Heartlands Hospital, with an ambulance raided. Police say both incidents are linked."
Thread by @LeftwaffenWatch on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "After a stabbing incident, a large mob of 30-40 Muslim men raided the A & E department of a hospital.  The police in this country at the behest of successive governments, are now allowing Muslims to operate large, armed criminal gangs unhindered because they know if they crackdown on them there will be huge riots  If this happened, the myth of integration and multiculturalism will be shattered overnight. The government really don’t want this being exposed so instead, they simply allow them to get away with whatever they want. ‘No arrests have been made’  Despite the fact there would be plenty of CCTV of the 10+ cars turning up loaded with Muslim thugs and even more inside the hospital.  If 30-40 white males turned up at a migrant hotel there would be dozens of police vehicles on the scene within minutes. In fact, this actually happened
West Midlands police are now stating this 'didn't happen' despite being reported in the MSM and local news and after several witness accounts"
So much for two tier policing being because suspects create evidence against them so it's easy for the police to catch them

Adam Wren on X - "I got into a taxi in Rochdale once with an elderly Pakistani man who asked me if I was a Christian — I told him i was, and he replied that Christians are good people of the book & that one day we will unite to wipe out the Jews. He told me that all things in the world move according to the will of allah, and so when the Christians and Muslims eventually unite and march into Israel their advanced weapons won’t work & we can just kill them.  I think about that ride pretty often, it says a lot about the cultural context he’s in that he’d say it to a passenger"

Winston Marshall on X - "Part of the reason there is so much confusion about defining ‘English’ and ‘British’ between right and left and within right and left is because in the wake of the war a false dichotomy was erected between civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism.  Notable scholars like Hans Kohn began this trajectory. All part of the “Open Society” school of thought, most famous of all being Karl Popper. In the wake of the Holocaust they were motivated, correctly, that the horror must never happen again. However they made some big errors, which the worldwide populist movement today is a reaction to.  And one of the errors was regarding national identity: placing “culture” in the ethnic-nationalism camp of the false-dichotomy, and written off as bad.  Hence the offence the commentariat exhibit when someone claims someone else is (or they themselves are) not English.  Hans Kohn himself wrote repeatedly that nationality had porous borders. Those on the right who are too rigid with the terminology- well we all know where that goes.  But likewise those on the left who are too loose with ideology don’t realise the chaos they sow. (Destruction of social unity, The rape gangs scandal and rise in Islamism are obvious results)  To make things more complicated, different countries around the world have different concepts of what nationalism is. Comparing Britain or England to Japan makes as little sense as comparing South Africa to Norway.  And this is only part of the complication.  What the civic-nationalist gets wrong is that without a common culture their project falls apart. The founding fathers of America understood this - E Pluribus Unum.   For Britain - we are no longer united in understanding what our common culture is - partly (and IMO wrongly) out of guilt for our history, partly because of mass migration after the war. More complicated still by the concept of being a British subject before the war, and the British Nationality Act after the war.  Yes there is such thing as being ethnically English. Yes there is such thing as being administratively English (just about, administratively British is clearer).   Britain has failed to integrate the millions it is importing, partly because it’s impossible to integrate that many people that quickly, and partly because we ourselves can’t even tell them what they are integrating into. The terrible consequences of this will play out over the coming decades.  The English are a people, united by Alfred, and shaped by the land conquered three generations later by Athelstan.  It is an ancient heritage, much deeper than that of the British.  The British don’t have the same founding narrative, but a proud narrative nonetheless.  If we want a united Kingdom we better understand what heritage it is we are all participating in.   If everyone is British, no one is British. So what is the common culture that unites us all?"

Jonatan Pallesen on X - "When you think about it, it is quite incredible how nonsensical this is. Out of work foreigners can live anywhere. They don't need to get to work. They don't even need to live in Britain. And yet, they take up space in London of all places, one of the most important and productive locations in the world. London has a very large region wage premium. That is, the workers earn more there compared to similar workers in other locations in Britain. This is caused to a large degree by the benefits from agglomeration economies. [See Stansbury et al. 2023]. For this reason, London is one of the best places for a young, ambitious British person to build their career. They would contribute more to companies here, and in turn, increase their own value. Unfortunately, many are prevented from doing so due to a lack of housing. This figure from the same paper illustrates the large net migration of people of prime working age from London to the rest of the UK—where they will be less productive. If there was a free market, it would not be like this. In a market-driven system, housing would be allocated based on demand and the ability to pay, meaning high-value locations like London would naturally be occupied by those who contribute most to the economy. The reason unemployed foreigners occupy so much of London’s housing is that it is state-sponsored social housing. The UK government is discriminating against its own productive citizens in favour of unemployed foreigners. This is to the detriment of the British workers being discriminated against, and to the detriment of the economy of the country. And again, from a bird’s-eye view, the absurdity of this arrangement is striking. People who could live anywhere in the world are placed so that they take up what is among the most important housing anywhere in the world."

Actual Coverage on X - "Shia Muslims take over Westminster Bridge in London and conduct self-flagellation in honor of Imam Musa Kazim Martyrdom Procession 2025 26th January 205 Westminster Bridge London"

Suella Braverman says UK could become ‘first Islamist nation with nuclear weapons’ - "Braverman said: “Vice-president JD Vance said at the National Conservatism conference, at which I also spoke in the summer, that the UK was going to be the first Islamist nation with nuclear weapons. I don’t think he was joking. “Is it an impossibility that 20 years from now it will be the UK, not China or Russia, that will emerge as the greatest strategic threat to the USA? “Born out of a broken relationship and weak leadership. What happens if the UK falls into the hands of Muslim fundamentalism, our legal system gets substituted for Sharia Law and our nuclear capabilities vest in a regime not too dissimilar to that of Iran today? “Regardless of whether one thinks that is a realistic outcome, which I do not, should we not have the courage to ask these questions?”... the former Tory cabinet minister believes the UK-US relationship is “in tatters” due to Labour. “Under Keir Starmer, the UK is now more likely than ever to worship at the altar of punitive net zero policies, bend the knee at the cross of a distorted notion of human rights and submit to the will of supranational institutions rather than sticking up for the UK’s national security and long-term allies,” she said."
Colin Brazier on X - "Whatever you think of Braverman, for her to warn that the UK could be run by Islamists 20 years from now, is extraordinary. As a former Home Secretary she had access to briefings and operational data denied to the rest of us. This ought to be headline news"
Damn white supremacist!

Tom Jones on X - "In every single nation that collects this data, non-EU immigrants are shown to be a net fiscal drain. The reason Britain doesn’t collect or publish this data is that it would prove convulsively the same thing applies here. How much longer can we ignore it?"